Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Politics holding back poor school districts

Old age is said to impart
understanding. But considering that I seem to understand the world around me
less well the older I get, I’m thinking this “understanding” stuff is geezer
propaganda.

Among
the things I don’t understand are Georgia’s
the-right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-the-left-hand-is-doing education policies. Actually, since this is
Georgia, it would be the-right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing.

One
confounding question is why we’re subsidizing private schools to the tune of
tens of millions of dollars while shutting down a $2.6 million program of
“sparsity” grants that have enabled some rural school districts to hang on by
their fingernails. Just the description says it all. These aren’t
“living-in-the-lap-of-luxury” grants.

The
private school subsidy is getting a lot of attention right now, the “sparsity”
grants hardly any. The former was created four years ago by legislation that
allows individuals and corporations to take a dollar-for-dollar credit on their
state income tax for donations to “student scholarship organizations.” The SSOs
in turn award scholarships to students wanting to attend private schools.

Critics
of the program are indignant because its principal architect, Rep. Earl
Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, has introduced legislation that raises the annual
cap on these donations from just over $50 million to $80 million.

The
criticism highlights several questionable features of the program, but has focused
on its failure to abide by what one critic calls its “stated rationale” of
helping low-income students escape low-performing public schools for private
schools they couldn’t otherwise afford.

Whoever
stated that rationale, it wasn’t Ehrhart. He recently told The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution the program “was never sold” as an exclusive benefit for
low-income students.

And
making that even clearer, the pending legislation requires only that
scholarship recipients be “eligible to enroll” in a public school. That covers
every school-age child in the state, including private-school students. To
remove any lingering doubts, Ehrhart has been right up front about how he sees
the program, saying to the Atlanta newspaper, “I’m not trying to trick anyone.
It’s a voucher.”

Meanwhile,
there’s panic in the one- and no-stoplight towns below the gnat line. In Harry
Crews country, small, isolated school districts serving only a few hundred
students each, with so few teachers that it’s common for one teacher to cover
several grades, face the prospect of somehow having to get along with even
fewer teachers.

Superintendents
in these districts don’t know how they’ll go from absolute bare bones to less
than absolute bare bones and still offer anything remotely resembling education.

Another
thing I don’t understand is why self-styled conservatives have so little
interest in conserving anything. For many of these map-dot communities, the
schools and the churches are the center of community life, the glue that holds
these hardscrabble places together.

As
Beverly Grant, a retired Quitman County teacher, told the Journal-Constitution,
the school system is “the foundation of the community. Basically, it’s the only
thing the community really has ... .”

Anybody
who’s ever been to Quitman County will know exactly what she’s talking about.
Starve the schools and you fast-track these towns toward extinction. Why don’t
conservatives get that?

And
why don’t they get this?: If strewing vouchers around to give people more
school choices makes any sense at all, it makes sense only in urban and
suburban areas, like Cobb County where Ehrhart is from. In places like that,
you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a school.

But
in the sparsely populated areas of the state where schools are too far apart
even to consolidate, the urban and suburban fascination with “school choice” is
a cruel joke. For a voucher to be worth anything, people have to have options,
which the residents of the “sparsity” grant districts don’t, unless you count
moving away.

To
a more jaundiced eye, though, maybe this situation isn’t a case of the right
hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Maybe the right hand knows
exactly what it’s doing. Because enough people in the “sparsity” districts are
reliable Republican voters, the Republicans under the Gold Dome know they can
jerk those constituencies around with impunity. And for exactly the same
reason, Democrats ignore them. Both parties fish where the votes are. And
they’re not in Harry Crews country.